


Axl Heck's Guide to Wedding Planning

by scioscribe



Category: The Middle
Genre: F/M, Future Fic, Gen, Siblings, Wedding Planning, Weddings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-04
Updated: 2014-03-04
Packaged: 2018-01-14 13:36:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1268356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Axl needs Sue and Darrin's wedding not to suck and <i>obviously</i> he's the only person in the family with any sense of how to host a freaking party, so it falls to him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Axl Heck's Guide to Wedding Planning

**Author's Note:**

> A belatedly-posted Valentine's Day present for my valentine, crafted with love, some wedding checklists, and The Knot's floral arrangement suggestions.

The problem is like ninety percent Sue but where Axl really feels betrayed by the world is that the problem is also ten percent Darrin and he always thought Darrin had his _back_ on things, but no, Darrin has gotten _obsessed_ with floral arrangements so Axl has to learn how to use mums to complement hydrangeas because if Sue and Darrin are left in charge of their own wedding, the invitations are going to use the word _Sue-tiful_ and Darrin’s going to blow the honeymoon money on orchids, and it’s not like their parents are going to step in beyond getting all teary every five minutes, so it has to be Axl.

At least Brick gets hypnotized by invitations and does them all in calligraphy that actually looks sort of passable and his dad agrees to build the stage and his mom agrees to _not_ invite their cousins, so, yeah, there’s still like a _crap-ton_ of stuff he has to do.

So Axl:

1) Looks at Sue’s silk-covered A SIMPLE GUIDE TO A _SUE-TIFUL_ WEDDING, flips through it, shudders, and throws it in the trash.

2) Threatens to murder Darrin if he doesn’t pull in overtime at Boss Co. to actually get money for the freaking wedding.

3) Slips in a couple hundred of his own money because the place settings Sue liked weren’t _horrible_ but they were _expensive_ and she was like, “Oh, we can’t afford them,” and, like, Axl doesn’t make a _ton_ of money because he hasn’t gotten the team a championship yet and the school is still pissed that they added an astronomy elective for him to teach, but sometimes you just had to shell out. He tells Sue he got them on sale.

4) Gets Brad to help him.

5) Tells Brad to stop helping him because Brad is actually _worse than Sue_ , but at least Brad’s boyfriend agrees to be the videographer if Axl gives him Colts tickets, which, ugh, _fine_.

6) Sean’s band is surprisingly not terrible considering it’s him and his sister so Axl gets them and makes them promise to ignore literally all of Sue’s requests except _one_ , since it’s her wedding, and not Nickelback all night, no matter what Darrin says.

7) Refuses to help Sue pick out a dress because he has to have _some_ standards and that’s his _mom’s_ job. “And you have to actually put your foot down this time,” he says, “not like you did _all through high school_ when you let her dress like a freaking preschooler on acid,” but of course his mom doesn’t, so Sue’s wedding dress has giant bows and enough tulle to stuff an Easter basket. “It’s her day, Axl!” his mom explains—tearfully, everybody’s tearful about Sue getting married, which Axl doesn’t get because Darrin’s not _that_ bad—“It’s her day and she wants to look like a princess!” So Princess of Dorkville wedding dress is an unfortunate go.

8) Ditto on refusing to shop for bridesmaids dresses, but at least Carly has decent taste.

9) Books the honeymoon. “I can book the honeymoon, dude,” Darrin says. “Oh, really? Where are you going?” Darrin grins. “Indianapolis!” “Yeah, but no,” Axl says, “Sue’s never been to Hawaii, you want to go to Hawaii, don’t you? There’s, like, beaches. Roasted pigs.” “And coconuts!” “There you go.” Axl has zero clue why the coconuts are the selling point of a Hawaiian honeymoon to Darrin, but whatever works, and Sue is happy about it, and making Sue happy is a not entirely annoying feeling, so, whatevs.

10) Gets Revered Hayver to talk about God at the ceremony and make sure everything’s legal and chill.

11) _Not_ pick out the cake, because Sue and Darrin only want to do the fun stuff, so Axl’s not allowed to have cake all of a sudden? What kind of freakish dictatorship is this?

12) Gets wedding rings picked up. Darrin wants tungsten instead of gold and it looks pretty gothy but isn’t completely unacceptable and Sue wants rose gold instead of gold-gold and why aren’t people normal, like, anyone Axl’s related to? Why is he the only one who can tell that the only two real options are solid gold and platinum?

13) Throws Darrin’s bachelor party and makes Brick come, which Axl considers a victory on par with the season-ending game last year, which was pretty sweet, because Brick actually flirts with a steakhouse waitress. “He has a publishing deal with Muffin!” Axl tells her, and Brick’s like, “Puffin,” and Axl realizes that that is why he doesn’t read, because books have all this weird terminology, and when he’s like, “The one with the picture of a penguin,” Brick’s like, “It’s a division of Penguin,” and somehow there’s _math_ , so Axl sticks to stars and books about stars, which are straightforward and don’t have birds or whatever, but anyway, Brick gets the waitress’s number and Darrin doesn’t even look at any other girls, which is good because he’s marrying Axl’s sister but sad because Darrin is so _lame_ now, but Axl still hugs him and gets all weirdly emotional about things at the end of the night.

14) Un-invites Weird Ashley because WHAT IS HIS LIFE, seriously, she wasn’t even on the list.

15) Re-invites Weird Ashley.

16) Bashes his head against the wall.

But the day of actually goes surprisingly smoothly. Like, okay, Darrin oversleeps and Axl has to dump water on him, and Sean’s band caves to Sue and plays _three_ One Direction songs, and Brick actually brings a freaking book to the table at the reception, but, like, besides all that.

The bows on Sue’s dress don’t look as stupid as they could because they’re buttercup yellow and she looks sort of like Belle in _Beauty in the Beast_ (not like Axl’s seen it or anything), and Carly has gotten her hair to get all kind of piled-up on her head like an ice cream cone, and Sue, it turns out, is actually kind of pretty, and when she sees Darrin, she starts crying big, embarrassing Sue-tears which ruins the effect but makes everybody laugh and sob, which is wedding-y, based on the embarrassing amount of TLC Axl’s been watching lately. And Darrin totally cries too, so it’s even.

And Revered Hayver says that Sue is a special young woman he’s known all her life and he couldn’t be happier to see her marrying such a fine young man, and Axl’s mom starts hiccup-crying, and Sue and Darrin miss each other’s fingers trying to put the rings on, and then they kiss, which is gross, so Axl doesn’t look.

The reception is cool, because there’s dancing and people compliment Sue on the flowers while Axl preens and threatens under pain of death that Sue not tell anybody he did the arrangements, and she dances with him and Dad and Brick. Axl kisses her on the cheek and she gets make-up like, all _over_ his face, and then _he_ starts crying, but she finally lets him have cake, and the cake actually says _THANKS AXL_ on it even though it’s their wedding cake, like this is why he didn’t let them make any decisions, because they don’t know how to do stuff right, and Axl eats his name off the cake and makes Brick read to him until he calms down.

And somehow he ends up dancing with Weird Ashley.

So it turns out to not be the worst thing in the world that his best friend married his baby sister, because they’re equally disgustingly in love with each other, and equally, like, unsuited to living in the real world, which means at least they won’t drag each other out of their weird little bubble anytime soon.

Except he realizes a week later that he somehow drunkenly agreed to plan Sean’s wedding, so F his L, Axl has to start picking out roses and peonies, because Sean’s girl wants pink, like that’s not cliché. Axl doesn’t even _like_ stuff like this.

He’s at least going to talk her into black-and-white anemones.


End file.
